Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America by Judith Yaross Lee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. 230 pp.

Garrison Keillor so objected to the St. Martins Press biography that he convinced one writer to back away from the project. When that "unauthorized biography"—Michael Fedo’s The Man from Lake Wobegon (reviewed in SAH, Vol. 5 n.s., Numbers 2 and 3)—was published in 1987, Fedo lamented his subject’s recalcitrance and reprinted a copy of a letter from Keillor’s attorneys asking potential sources to withhold their cooperation. Following publication, Keillor insisted upon the deletion from subsequent editions of an anecdote concerning his supposed ire over picture-taking at his 1985 Anoka High School class reunion.

Judith Yaross Lee’s Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America is the second book-length treatment devoted to the career of Garrison Keillor, but unlike the first, it is not a biography but a scholarly study of "the development and rhetoric of Keillor’s humor" that has benefitted from his full cooperation. The volume is part of the University Press of Mississippi Studies in Popular Culture series under the general editorship of M. Thomas Inge.

Commenting on Fedo’s book, Keillor said, "Unauthorized isn’t really the word for it. Unresearched would be more the word." No one will be tempted to say such things of Lee’s book, however, as it is well-documented and securely anchored in archival sources from Minnesota Public Radio and several personal interviews with Keillor. The apparatus of the book includes an appendix with the original airing dates of published monologues from A Prairie Home Companion (those commercially available as recordings and in Leaving Home); nineteen pages of notes; a chronologically-ordered bibliography, complete into 1990, of Keillor’s written and recorded work (including even unsigned pieces from his university days); a selected bibliography of works about Keillor; and an ample and usable index.

Lee devotes her analysis to the humor and craft of Keillor as performer, oral storyteller, and writer, introducing biographical detail

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and anecdote only occasionally. In two chapters she traces the rhetorical development of Keillor’s persona as host of A Prairie Home Companion; later chapters deal with his collected and uncollected short stories and his books, Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home; she does not deal at length with We Are Still Married (1989) or with the new show, American Radio Company of the Air, that began its first season in fall 1989. She chose 1987, which saw the end of A Prairie Home Companion, the publication of Leaving Home, and Keillor’s departure from Minnesota, as a meaningful cutoff point for her study of an ongoing and prolific career. Her method relies most heavily on rhetorical and literary-critical analysis, but she also makes effective use of perspectives offered by folklorists, sociologists, and specialists in mass media and communication.

Given an author whose own life is widely presumed to be intimately associated with his tales of Lake Wobegon, her avoidance of biography may seem paradoxical if not perverse. Lee’s strategy, on the contrary, yields powerful insights and rests on sound theoretical assumptions. In her discussion of a seemingly autobiographical monologue, "Dog Days of August," for example, she readily grants that the tale may be rooted in the teller’s experience. Nevertheless, its historical or biographical accuracy are "beside the point," not because they may be fictitious, but because they have been transformed by art: "Historical fact," Lee asserts, "loses all importance in the face of literary truth, a truth of the highest order to a storyteller." Thus the even the most realistic- or autobiographical-seeming tale about days of yore in Lake Wobegon may imitate "reality but remains distinct from it both in content and form." Keillor is not "revealed" by such tales because "they fictionalize his experiences, transforming life into a story, an object of artifice; at the other extreme, they are fictions." It is her purpose to discuss how such works are made and how they evolved from experiments with form and narrative art.

Her resistance to the biographical impulse is not dogmatic, however, and Lee uses the life to illuminate the work when it seems Important. In the Leaving Home story "David and Agnes, a Romance," for example, she reads allusions to Keillor’s unfolding passionate romance with Ulla Skaerved, whom he would marry four and one-half months after originally telling the story in August 1985. And she discusses signs of Keillor’s growing dissatisfaction with A Prairie Home Companion in stories aired months prior to his public announcement on February 14, 1987 that he would be leaving in June.

Lee is particularly adept at placing Keillor within the historical tradition of American humor, especially as this tradition has been

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chronicled by Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill (who taught and collaborated at the University of Chicago, where Lee wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on black humor [1986]). She presents Keillor as a humorist, whose characteristic pose as a radio performer is that of the cracker-barrel philosopher and whose work written to be read is in the tradition "of the nineteenth-century literary comedians" and the New Yorker humorists from 1925 to the present. She maintains that his published short fictions are underrated as this considerable body of work shows his aesthetic sophistication and stylistic virtuosity at its best. She holds that ‘just about all his oral and written humor . . . exploits the interrelations among teller, telling, and tale" but discovers flaws in the "literary experiments" that constitute Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home.

Her book succeeds admirably in detailing how Keillor’s comic personae developed and evolved, on the radio and in print, and convincingly establishes that while his work continues in the venerable traditions of American humor, in his short stories especially, "he mixes the comic conventions of the past with voices and values of the present to create a distinctly contemporary humor in the American grain."

Peter A. Scholl                                                              Luther College

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"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": American Comic Vision. By David E. E. Sloane. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies. Boston: G. K Hall, 1988; New Essays on "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Ed. Louis J. Budd. The American Novel Series. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Huckleberry Finn scholars are, in Tom Sawyer’s words, "free as any cretur that walks this earth," and by that standard not free at all, shaped as they are by the countless efforts of earlier scholars to illuminate this already luminous work. Sloane’s and Budd’s recent books set out, nevertheless, to shed new light while re-introducing readers to the existing tradition of HF scholarship.

Like other volumes in Twayne’s Masterwork Studies series, Sloane’s book consists of chapters on the historical context, the importance, and the critical reception of the work; a multi-chapter critical reading of the novel; a chronology of the literary figure’s life and works; a selected, annotated bibliography; and an index. The book provides an appreciative and often engaging introduction to the novel; it disappoints, however, by oversimplifying Huck’s and Jim’s moral stance and by failing to place Sloane’s ideas in the body of HF scholarship.

Sloane’s stated goal is to demonstrate that HF is a masterpiece of American fiction that expresses a "higher ethic" (17), despite the claims of censors past and present that the novel merely showcases immorality. Sloane convincingly supports this thesis, showing that episodes in the novel loved for their hilarity serve double and triple duty by echoing motifs, furthering plot lines, and revealing character. Sloane reminds us of the many resonances that account for the novel’s richness and symmetry.

Sloane explores several long-standing questions about the novel:  the excised flatboat episode and the controversial "Evasion" chapters. He also joins the argument about Twain’s stance on racism. He attributes characters’ racist language and other behavior to Twain’s "realism," arguing that such references appear at strategic points to make characters appear foolish or cruel. But he neglects the more difficult problem of Twain’s racist characterization of Jim; and, as in his discussions of other

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issues, he omits reference to the considerable body of commentary on all sides of the controversy. Sloane’s bibliographical chapter guides readers to discussions of some of these issues, but his own analyses seem uninformed by the lively dialogue that precedes them.

Although Sloane’s enthusiasm over Twain’s artistry and moral vision is engaging, it overlooks ambiguities and sometimes draws on illogical sources for proof. After establishing Twain’s knowledge and use of 19th-century literary comedians’ techniques and topics, Sloane illogically argues that Twain’s use of this genre provides evidence of his moral stance, because "The literary comedians during the Civil War were the Union’s staunch defenders" (150).

But if Twain’s alliance with the literary comedians bears moral significance (an unproven assumption), his involvement in the minstrel tradition might also affect his ability to create a realistic adult black character. Sloane repeatedly mentions minstrel comedy, too, as a source of many of the comical exchanges between characters; yet he apparently does not see this source as evidence to support Ralph Ellison’s criticism that Twain, steeped in southern culture and the oral minstrel tradition, was unable to portray Jim as fully adult, a failure constituting, in Ellison’s words, "a lost fall in Twain’s otherwise successful wrestle with the ambiguous figure in blackface" ("Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke." Partisan Review 25.2 [Spring 1958], 2 12-22). Clearly, proof or disproof of the novel’s racism lies not in Twain’s comic alliances but in the novel itself, where we see racists depicted as fools, and a black adult depicted as clever, humane—and childlike.

In this matter and others, Sloane seems unduly reluctant to acknowledge the moral and narrative ambiguity of HF: the ambiguity, for example, of Huck’s I’ll-go-to-hell decision on Jim’s behalf (when Huck has already made clear that he prefers hell to Miss Watson’s and the Widow Douglas’s "dismal regular" society and, we discover later, Jim was already free anyway). The moral power—and hilarity—of HF resides precisely in its relentlessly challenging ambiguity, born of its perplexing narrative point of view: a world observed and reported by a warm-hearted, naive, keenly observant boy who tells "stretchers"—who, in fact, finds lies safer than the truth.

Like any other readers, the beginning scholars targeted by Twayne’s Masterwork Studies need a study that acknowledges the complexity of Twain’s masterpiece and provides scholarly apparatus sufficient to place the author’s conclusions in a context of other critical commentary. Louis Budd’ s collection, New Essays on Huckleberry Finn, also written for beginning Twain scholars, meets these criteria and offers, as well, a series of fresh perspectives on Huckleberry Finn.

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Budd’s introductory essay provides an overview of HF scholarship, tracing conflicting assessments; describing critical approaches to the novel; analyzing, decade by decade, issues of interest and debate among critics; and guiding readers through scholarly editions and collections of criticism. Budd renders a lively account of the noisy conversation instigated by Twain’s novel.

Michael Davitt Bell’s "Mark Twain, ‘Realism,’ and Huckleberry Finn," the second essay in Budd’s collection, challenges the truism that HF is a masterpiece of American realism. While acknowledging that Twain advocated "truth to life" in fiction, Bell argues that Twain is misclassified as a realist: first, Twain never wrote coherent, sustained treatises on literary theory; second, when Twain wrote about fiction in letters and notebooks, he never claimed to be a realist or even used the term realism; third, although he praised the realist fiction of his friend William Dean Howells, he explicitly denounced as "labored and tedious’" the work of two writers Howells praised for their realism: Henry James and George Eliot.

Finally, Bell argues, Twain never assumed the task Howells names in Criticism and Fiction as the sine qua non of the realist writer: the fulfillment of the writer’s obligation to readers to promote a more moral, democratic society; realists fulfill a "social responsibility by discrediting what is Irresponsible [Bell’s italics)" (43). The irresponsibilities that the realist must correct are the purely artistic or literary, the artificial, the romantic—those very qualities, Bell admits, cherished by Tom Sawyer, the Grangerfords, and the Duke and the Dauphin, among others, and burlesqued by Twain. But Bell argues that Huck’s final response to what he has experienced in the novel is fundamentally antisocial: he never tries to correct society, only to leave it behind for he "free and easy" life on the raft, or in the Indian territory.

Bell’s reminder that Twain and Howells played very different roles in developing the concept of realism is well taken; however, his case .against Twain’s identity as a realist is built on at least two shaky assumptions. One is that the best definition of literary realism is to be found in Howells’ literary criticism. Surely another suitable source of definition is the fiction of Howells’ favorite realist writer, Mark Twain. Another shaky assumption is that if the hero of a novel is not socially responsible, the novel necessarily fails to discredit irresponsibility. Surely Twain’s relentless linking of the romantic excesses he burlesques, not only with foolishness, as Bell claims, but also with cruelty and violence, as Sloane carefully documents, provides a more powerful discrediting than a more courageous Huck could achieve.

In the third essay, "‘An Art So High’: Style in Adventures of

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Huckleberry Finn," the linguist Janet Holmgren McKay analyzes Twain’s use of the written word to create the illusion of Huck’s speech. McKay identifies a number of grammatical features in Huck’s language: present-tense verbs substituted for past-tense verbs, creating a "habitual present" in descriptive passages ("you see the mist curl up") and a "timeless present" which frames judgments and inferences ("Music is a good thing"); verbs that are "colloquial and concrete," often with adverbial elements (the world "darkens up"); participial verbs, sometimes with an "a" affixed ("treetops a-plunging about")—all devices that suggest the vernacular while they lend almost palpable immediacy to the language.

McKay classifies Huck’s grammatical errors and points out that they often serve specific literary purposes: nonstandard verb forms (seen for saw); dialect terms (without for unless); confused words (diseased for deceased); dialect pronunciation (deffersit for deficit); simple misspellings (sivilize); and double negatives. Further, McKay observes that although Huck’s syntax seems simple, as befits an unlettered boy, in fact his sentences are masterfully rhythmic, emphatic, and complex. Similarly purposeful is Huck’s limited vocabulary. His repeated use of some words actually achieves strategic emphasis: monstrous, lonesome, comfortable, pretty soon, by and by.

Finally, McKay shows that Twain creates this artistic illusion of speech with sometimes-noticeable departures from verisimilitude: Huck’s unlikely ability to reproduce other speakers’ dialects; astonishing similarities between Sherburn’s and Pap’s voices—an appropriate thematic link, but a linguistic improbability; the disappearance of Jim’s black dialect when Huck remembers his words in the second conscience scene, because, in McKay’s words, "Huck and Jim’s voice have become one (78). McKay’s study serves not only as a careful analysis of Huck’s language, but as another amplification of students’ understanding of realism in fiction: it makes clear the stunning artifice required to achieve "truth to life."

Lee Clark Mitchell’s essay, "‘Nobody but Our Gang Warn’t Around’: The Authority of Language in Huckleberry Finn," presents a fascinating and fresh argument justifying the closing "Evasion" section that troubles so many readers because of its apparent retraction of what is perceived as Huck’s moral growth or—perhaps worse—its trivializing of his moral choice to help Jim. In Mitchell’s view, the ending is completely appropriate, not only for its "formal coherence," but also for its "moral obscurity" (84). The novel repeatedly shows, argues Mitchell, that Tom and Huck both make decisions, not according to any larger, external moral principle, but according to what feels "right" to them at the time, an entirely self-reflexive standard determined by social conven-

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tion and language. The great difference between Tom and Huck is that Tom realizes "how fully language creates the self’ and how selves thus created " invariably reshape the structure of language" and of reality (101). Unlike Huck, who naively believes in a constant natural reality and a real self independent of his many assumed selves, Tom knows all along that moral decisions are arbitrary—that such trumped-up realities as setting "a free nigger free" are only sport and bear "no practical motive" (101).

Mitchell explores the dizzying interplay of social convention, language, and self that establishes the arbitrariness of Huck’s behavior, self, and notions of reality. Huck becomes, in Mitchell’s reading, not the clear-sighted and practical naïf, but a self created and re-created entirely by language, who wrongly believes that a real self exists independent of his many deliberately assumed selves. Huck’s dual role as character and narrator intensifies the elusiveness of reality: we sometimes even lose the sense of Huck as author, as in the scene at the end of Chapter 6, when Huck, in Mitchell’s words, "falls asleep during his own narrative" (92). And of course, Huck alerts us from the beginning to the fact that Mark Twain’s novels contain "stretchers." No matter how inclined we may be to believe that Huck and Jim act for better reasons than Tom does, it is difficult to escape Mitchell’s conclusion that the rules they play by are no less contrived than Tom’s. For Mitchell, the distinction between them and Tom is not their moral superiority but Tom’s awareness that their behavior is a game.

Steven Mailloux’ s essay "Reading Huckleberry Finn: The Rhetoric of Performed Ideology" identifies Twain’s success in manipulating readers’ reactions to the events of the novel as the key to its powerful social commentary. For Mailloux, Twain’s humor depends on the reader’s perceiving both Huck’s intentions and "the discrepancy between his tale and the ‘truth’ as the reader understands it" (108). Readers’ skepticism is cultivated gradually: first, Tom’s pranks turn readers into amused critics of those who misread texts and slavishly adhere to their authority; next, Pap’s "free nigger" speech is offered as a text that obviously should be read skeptically; later, readers are given the more difficult critical task of seeing through Huck’s refusal to argue further with Jim about Frenchmen, when Jim has bested Huck. Finally, the reader arrives at Huck’s conscience scenes ready to form judgments different from Huck’s and, as a consequence, finds Huck’s heart good and his public conscience racist—even though Huck recognizes neither his own goodness nor society’s racism (123).

Mailloux’s rhetorical reading leads him to a synthesis of the arguments on both sides of the debate over the "evasion" passage that

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ends the novel. Readers’ discomfort with the ending results from their well-developed habit of reading the social reality behind Huck’s narrative: we participate by filling in the moral implications of Huck’s cooperation in delaying Jim’s release and in Tom’s creating the "evasion" caper. Whether we agree with Van Wyck Brooks and Leo Marx that the closing sequence represents a retreat on Twain’s part from serious themes established in the novel, or with T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling that the sequence creates formal perfection, we must agree that the novel has done its work: "The fact that the problem appears at all testifies that the novel works, not as a formal unity but as a rhetorical performance in which the reader must participate in order to read at all" (129).

Budd’s collection provides Twain scholars—whether beginners or not—an opportunity to follow several stimulating issues in HF scholarship. The essayists in the collection neither condescend to readers nor make inappropriate assumptions about their familiarity with earlier scholarship. Together, the essays provide a valuable introduction to the novel and to the critical commentary that surrounds it—setting readers free by apprising them of the conversation that has gone before.

June Chase Hankins                         Southwest Texas State University

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